You can think what you like about rich lists. I personally think they're a bit creepy: not the making of lists in and of itself, which I accept that a lot of people really enjoy, but the elaborate homage paid to money. It's fetishistic; whenever the Sunday Times team come out with their Wisden of wealth, I really get the sense that if they could only persuade JK Rowling to get all her money out of the bank, put it in a room and roll about in it, then their every dream would have been realised, and they could shut down and go home.

The City & Guilds Vocational Rich List raises a different kind of question mark, however: it has produced the definitive top 100 people who have made money by a different route – through an apprenticeship, a vocational qualification or, occasionally, a freakish talent. You can swerve university, is its rousing message, and still become a millionaire – or even, in five notable cases, a billionaire, though one of those billionaires is slightly puzzled by this elision between "vocational degree" and "not going to university". James Dyson clarifies: "Every building we live and work in has been designed. And I was going to learn how. I wouldn't get a degree in classics, modern languages, or psychology. Mine was more vocational. At the Royal College of Art, I learned that engineering is integral to design. Ambition was nurtured. Before I finished I had designed and built a high-speed landing craft." He's not, in other words, the living definition of the "self-made" entrepreneur. But many of the people on this list are: few have inherited their wealth. It's strongly biased towards pure entrepreneurship, the rags-to-riches tales that are the likable face of capitalism, that even Marxists enjoy.

Meanwhile, a report came out yesterday from Push, the independent university guide website, to show that average student debt will hit £50,000 once tuition fees go up, and Johnny Rich, its editor, went on the Today programme to make a point that I don't think we've heard in any conversation about education, at least since the dawn of New Labour, and possibly in my lifetime: "Calling it a debt is the wrong thing, it should have been called a tax. But what it is, is a cost. It is a massive cost for higher education, so the important thing is choosing the right university and the right course."

For years, the middle classes have talked about university as just a natural next step, a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood, irrespective of any knowledge or skill imparted by the practice. When, in the past, people talked about choosing the right course, it was never in the sense of, "What job would this equip you for?" That rationale would wipe out the whole of the humanities, except for modern languages, and even then you would be strongly enjoined to stop banging on about Dante and learn how to say "collateralised debt obligation" in Italian.

The educational revolution of the Blair government was not to address the purpose of university, but rather, to extend the reach: it shouldn't be another middle-class stranglehold, it should be much more widespread, and by 2006, this had been enshrined in a target. The Leitch review decreed that, ideally, more than 40% of adults should be educated to level four (as degrees are known) and above, and the target of 50% was enthusiastically taken up.

The coalition has ditched the target, though not the issue: it is still policy that the more people go to university the better. But the question is never asked: What if university isn't the best place for you? What if it's not even the best place for people to go, in the interests of economic growth overall? What if business people would be better off learning other things, such as how to get up in the morning, and how to look and smell pleasant? The phrase "educated beyond his intelligence" used to be bandied about pretty freely, and now nobody ever uses it; higher education has the tang of higher moral purpose, and to question its universal value is thought of as a branch of snobbery, an attempt to go back in time and kick out the lower orders. But of course, this results in a perverse opposite snobbery, where jobs and skills and success stories that come about below this fabled level four are held in low esteem.

So, if you want answers about business, you have to ask business people; and the problem with them is, they are all incredibly charismatic. I could, at a distance, pretend to adjudicate between the views of Deborah Meaden – entrepreneur, Dragons' Den star, net worth £40m – and Peter Randall, CEO of Equiduct and passionate advocate of higher education. But the truth is, while listening to each of them, I was nodding away like a dashboard dog. They both do that thing where they'll intersperse what they're saying with your name – it must be taught on management courses. And it works on me; it makes me feel really special. So I'll have to leave you to decide who's right. Meaden left school at 16, went to Brighton Technical College, but more for the "bright lights" than the ordinary national diploma in which she scraped a pass (it's the equivalent of A-levels). "The only time I've ever got into trouble was this period. I ran up £3,000 on my credit card, which at the time was a blinking fortune. I still don't have a credit card today." This makes me think of what Simon Tucker, the chief executive of the Young Foundation, said about the shortcomings of traditional further education (I should preface this by saying he is as thorough a supporter of higher education as you could imagine). "Universities are very old-fashioned. You do a three-year degree, which is strongly designed to train you to be an academic. It's very strongly biased towards doing essays in the arts, and experiments in the sciences. You're unlikely, in your job, to be writing essays or doing experiments. And they don't teach the softer skills: self-discipline, enterprising behaviour, resilience, creativity, which means that young people often get quite a shock when they leave and enter the world of work."

The experience of getting hugely into debt on a credit card strikes me as teaching all these skills, albeit the hard way. Sure, if there's one thing about university that is now guaranteed, it's that it will leave you with a huge debt. In reality, your finances are all your own, but the debt is structured in such a way that you won't have to think about it until you're a "proper adult" – and it very much operates, still, as an affluent rite of passage. Neither financially independent nor financially dependent, neither living alone nor living at home, your time almost your own but not: this twilight existence is what makes it such a memorable, cherished time for many people, but it also, self-evidently, puts your life on hold. You'll grow up faster if you have to sort out your own credit card debt at 17. But that's not really Meaden's main point: "It does worry me that young people think that's the only way. People think education is all about what goes on in school and university. There's not enough emphasis put on other types of education, [such as] apprenticeships. If you can't get to university, you find yourself a job in manufacturing, they're not valued. And that's not right, people have got to make things." She tells me that in a mill she's recently invested in in the south-west, they looked for apprentices for a year before they filled the positions. "And not because I'm not paying proper wages, because I'm not paying apprenticeship wages, I'm paying proper wages." Her other objection is that "I could see a situation where people at university would be too scared to admit they didn't know stuff". I've heard this argument extended: that university makes people think in a conformist, risk-averse way, that there is something unimaginative in the act of teaching people how to structure the way they make decisions and the way they articulate those decisions. Julie Burchill always calls universities middle-class sausage factories.

Randall, whose company has something to do with finance (it would take me too long to explain what it does: suffice it to say that last week it traded over ¤1bn for the first time), makes the opposite point. He studied law at the LSE because he wanted to understand how governments use law to control economic activity. He was aiming squarely at the city, even though: "The City in the late 70s, early 80s was not a particularly sexy place. The sexy place was probably still oil." (That's just a little bit of history for you … ) Anyway, "on the contrary, education does not make you risk-averse, although I agree that risk is the critical issue. The fact is that human beings are particularly poor at risk decisions. People buy lottery tickets; as a risk decision, that's appalling. The whole of business is about attaching probability to outcomes, and that's about asking yourself what the biases are and addressing proper risk factors. In business, it's great if you make 55 right decisions out of 100. Most people make 48." This is university: it may not teach you how to discipline yourself, but it teaches you how to analyse; indeed, that is its entire purpose.

Mind you, Randall distinguishes between his type of business and that of "self-funded entrepreneurs", "who I think are just amazing. The guys that really start out with next to nothing, and just plug away at selling something, and do very well at it, and invest in something else. That's the type of activity that is great and at all times should be helped and supported." Tacitly, that's the kind of activity that you don't need a law degree for, the raw business verve that is very easily explained, because it just involves thinking of something, making it and selling it. There is an honesty to that kind of activity, epitomised in the no doubt carefully crafted bluntness of Alan Sugar that is particularly politically appealing now, when we're in this dire need of "rebalancing" our economy, so that we're not just trading on the eurobond market, we're actually making something. Manufacturing is the golden goose of the government's fiscal strategy, that's the bit that's meant to work and not hurt. The trouble is, as Tucker points out: "Manufacturing is a very small proportion of our economy, so even if the sector were to double in size, it still wouldn't dent the numbers wanting to go to university. We're a very expensive country in terms of labour. You really want to be creating high-end jobs, rather than more basic jobs, where east Asian countries can quite easily outpace us." And all those high-end jobs, where we have established demand, as a nation, and struggle with the skills to supply, are those for which degree-level education would seem to be necessary: IT, healthcare, education, consumer positions, managerial jobs. "What we're seeing in the economy is an hourglass shape emerging; increasing number of jobs in the high-skilled end, increasing number of jobs in the low-skilled end, hospitality, restaurant, leisure, people who don't need many skills other than to get on with people – and nothing in the middle."

Manufacturing would be this middle; and you can make a mint out of it, as the City and Guilds list shows. The question is: has the evolution away from it been a natural trajectory of a developed economy, or the more forced result of a huge push towards higher education for its own sake? Whatever the answer, it probably will not sway prospective degree students one way or the other: they'll be thinking about that 50 grand.